Pulling into Ontonagon on Wednesday, the roads were wide but empty. Empty roadside parking lined the street in front of the village businesses. Until I got near the end of the street. For almost a block in either direction, cars filled the parking in front of Syl’s Cafe.
David and Deanna Morin after their lunch at Syl’s Cafe. Behind them, the photography of Bryan Byrnes adorns the walls.
“Syl’s is our social event,” David Morin said.
David sat at a table near the window with his wife Deanna and Wanda McKay having lunch.
They’ve ordered takeout regularly during shutdowns as well as the tourist season--to keep away from the vacationers. Now that it’s an off-season, they were happy to feel safe coming back to the dining room. David called Syl’s Cafe a lifeline of Ontonagon through the pandemic. He said Kathy Wardynski, the owner, has an eye for hiring good staff.
“The kids that work here are just outstanding,” he said.
The Morins even started going to some of the local ball games to cheer for the girls who waited on them. Wardynski says she hires as much as a quarter of the local senior class.
Linda, who declined to give her last name, said she didn’t like the pandemic regulations, but came out to support Syl’s Cafe, and got takeout regularly, especially the Friday night salmon.
“I think they’ve handled it really, really well, I think they’ve outdone themselves,” Linda said.
The group also really appreciated the outdoor dining that was set up for the first time.
“She took care of tourism as well as her regular customers,” Sandy Morin, sitting with Linda, said.
They complimented Wardynski’s creativity in adding new menu items, like breakfast bowls and a weekly Chinese food night. They were also supportive of the way she took care of her staff.
“Which is wonderful, and lots of people didn’t, which is so sad.”
Wardynski’s care for her staff didn’t start or stop with the pandemic. Her core staff is full-time with retirement and paid vacation benefits. She hires college and high school students part-time to handle tourism seasons and fill in the rest of the regular schedule.
When the pandemic struck, she was able to keep all the full-time staff on part-time, and secured government assistance for them to cover the lost wages.
Kristy Strauch has worked at Syl’s Cafe “off and on for probably 12/13 years.”
She jumps back and forth between working in the kitchen and serving tables.
“Kathy is one of the best bosses that we could have,” Strauch said. “She has taken care of us through all this.”
One of Joseph Del Real’s arrangements on a table at Syl’s Cafe.
Joseph Del Real, one of the cooks, also makes silk flower arrangements. When Syl’s Cafe reopened with social distancing restrictions, Wardynski partnered with him to decorate the blocked-off tables with flowers. He said the extra exposure hasn’t helped much yet but hopes it will as the pandemic eases and people feel safe spending more money again.
Melissa Preiss, who has worked at Syl’s for about ten years, said they’re staying pretty busy, despite the seating restrictions. She said a lot of the locals are still coming out, even though snowmobilers aren’t around as much this year.
It has also been a little more difficult interacting with even the nice customers.
“When I smile, they would smile,” Preiss said.
Now that they can’t see her face, she says she talks with her hands a little more.
Preiss has also had to deal with some customers not wanting to comply with pandemic regulations.
“There are definitely some people that give you a hard time,” she said. “Don’t want to fill out the papers, won’t wear the mask…”
She said while it’s been hard to deal with, Wardynski has always helped out with difficult customers.
“We’re just happy to be back open and have our locals back,” Preiss said. “And we are ready for whatever is next.”
Stephanie Ferrard has worked at Syl’s Cafe for about five years now. She said that initially, the pandemic was really scary.
“You know, just not knowing,” Ferrard said.
Once the lockdown opened up in the summer, she said things bounced back fast.
“It was the most-wildest, crazy summer we have ever worked,” Ferrard said.
She said it was hard to keep up with impatient, “hangry” people while also keeping up with extra cleaning and sanitation steps.
“And then we closed up again,” Ferrard said. “We went down to take-out only after that, because the numbers went up.”
At 25% capacity, they had to create a waiting list for many people, which was another thing for the servers to handle alongside their tables and sanitation.
She said when people argue with her about the rules, she tries not to let it bother her.
Dawson Pollard works the grill at Syl’s Cafe.
While we spoke in a booth, a customer nearby pushed back against Preiss about leaving contact tracing information.
“It just is what it is,” Ferrard said. “And we have to follow the rules and you know, try not to make a fuss about it.”
She said there are also customers who have been extra nice because they see those who aren’t.
Wardynski’s grandmother, Sylvia, opened Syl’s Cafe in 1972. When she decided to sell in the early 1990s, she offered it to her family first. Her daughters were grown and moved away and were busy with other things, but Wardynski and her husband were living downstate and looking for an opportunity to start their family closer to some of their grandparents.
“So on June 1, 1994, was my first official day as owner,” Wardynski said, “and I was 25 years old at the time.”
Wardynski has steered Syl’s Cafe through other economic troubles before. The nearby paper mill closed about ten years ago, and the highway, which used to run over a bridge down the block, was rerouted to a new bridge about half a mile away, too.
“So we used to have first crack at all of the snowmobilers that came into town because they would come across the bridge and be here,” Wardynski said.
When the bridge moved, Wardynski took a job at Michigan Technological University, and worked there for 12 years as the manager of purchasing and process improvement for dining services. It was there that she first realized the impact the pandemic would have.
“We got really lucky,” Wardynski said. “We were already planning to be closed.”
She was starting a renovation project about the same time as the pandemic regulations began. Wardynski called the sheriff and confirmed it would be okay for the three contractors to work during the shutdown. While Syl’s Cafe closed down, the staff worked out of the local golf course clubhouse, as they are also contracted to feed inmates at the Ontonagon County jail. Once it was allowed by regulations, they started serving curbside meals to customers out of the golf course kitchen, too.
Kathy Wardynski
A proof of Syl’s Cafe’s new menu. With a larger spiral binding, Wardynski anticipates her servers being able to slide a dowel through it, dunk it in sanitizer, and hanging it to dry. This will be a lot faster than wiping down each page one at a time.
Wardynski is developing a new menu that will be easier and faster for her waitstaff to sanitize between customers. She experimented with different packaging to improve the takeout dining experience. She bought a $1,000 electrostatic sprayer that mists with a sanitizing solution and they use that through the dining room every day.
“You can do the whole restaurant in like 10 minutes,” Wardynski said.
Syl’s Cafe is putting the work in but is still caught between trying to keep people safe and serve as many people as possible.
“It feels like you’re continually walking on a tightrope of just trying to do the right thing and keep employees safe,” Wardynski said. “I tell them, we wear a mask to keep us safe from you. Because we don’t want to be sick, and we all have families, and we have grandparents and different things. And so we’ve tried to do everything that we possibly could to keep everybody healthy, and not be the ones that spread it because my worst fear would be to be the one place that was identified as the super spreader place because of something that happened.”
Wardynski also recognizes how well-positioned her business has been. For instance, she pointed out there are no nearby drive-thru restaurants to compete with. The serendipitous planning of their renovation was also a lucky break. And because they’re a fair distance from the Wisconsin border, the more relaxed restrictions there didn’t poach her customers, either.
Syl’s Cafe is a stand-out, both in terms of precautions and successes, but a lot of other businesses and their employees in the area have been fighting the same fights with varying degrees of success.
Leanne Weeks, the manager of Swift’s Tru Value Hardware in Houghton, said she figured something serious was happening when they started checking people at the airport.
“Usually, the government doesn’t spend money to have a precautionary effort like that,” she said.
She kept a close eye on CDC and WUPHD guidelines after that and made every effort to follow them. Cleaning frequently-touched areas, requiring facemasks, instituting social distancing, and check-in and check-out procedures for staff. At first, masks were difficult to source, so they used painter’s masks and respirators off the shelf.
“We just tried our very best to make sure that we could help protect the community,” Weeks said.
After a year, she said a lot of the procedures have become “old-hat”. They also continue to provide curbside service for those who don’t want to come into the store.
Weeks said she appreciates the community support and the people who make the extra effort to shop at the store.
“It’s definitely not an easy time for anybody,” Weeks said.
Marilyn Swift, the store’s owner who was traveling to see family after being vaccinated, said in a text message, “Even when some didn’t want to wear masks in the store for whatever reason, we wanted to stay in business and felt that this had nothing to do with truth or lies. I obey the law. I follow rules. I believe in police and military. I fly the American Flag in front and in back of my business every day. I am proud to be an American and am grateful for all of my customers.”
Peg Kauppi and her husband have run The Mariner North in Copper Harbor for 44 years. They were traveling home from a wedding last March when they heard about an outbreak in the Boston airport.
“So we kind of knew something was going on,” Kauppi said.
The small size of Copper Harbor, with only about 100 year-round residents, made people feel safe initially, until they considered the scope of their business. Their guests travel from 42 different states, and Washington, D.C..
“We were like ‘Wow, we are as out there as any metropolitan area,” Kauppi said. “We felt very, very vulnerable.”
During the initial shutdown, they searched for guidelines to implement. They put up plexiglass screens, switched to individually-wrapped silverware, and more. They also didn’t reopen immediately after being allowed to, because their staff still felt exposed.
“And we knew we couldn’t make them do anything that we wouldn’t do ourselves,” Kauppi said.
When they did reopen, and diners didn’t honor the tables that were blocked off for social distancing, they decided to entirely remove those tables.
“We had to reinvent the whole thing,” Kauppi said.
Over the winter, when indoor dining was banned, The Mariner North hosted outdoor fire pits for their takeout customers to dine around. This allowed snowmobilers a chance to warm up and socialize even though they couldn’t eat inside around a table.
Kauppi said that while “95%” of their customers have been thankful for the extra precautions, a few have been “angry, and so rude”.
“Our staff has taken a huge amount of abuse,” Kauppi said.
Kauppi has had to postpone reopening for dine-in in part because they can’t find the staff to support it. Some staff have quit over the stress of the regulations and having to enforce them.
Despite the difficulty, Kauppi said she thinks The Mariner North and Copper Harbor as a whole has been fortunate through the pandemic and “weathered this pretty well”.
Jesse Hannon-Manderfield opened NV Salon in Houghton more than ten years ago, when she was 26. COVID-19 has hit her business hard, in no small part because she enforces the pandemic restrictions.
“We’ve lost quite a few people,” she said.
During the initial shutdown, NV Salon sent home its stylists, who aren’t technically employees but independent contractors. After the initial shutdown, the schedule filled up, but not everyone would comply with mask-wearing or social distancing policies.
“I’d have to say it so many times a day, ‘Can you please wear your mask appropriately?’” Hannon-Manderfield said.
Eventually, she took to asking people in advance of their appointments if they were alright with wearing their masks throughout the entire appointment. Not everyone was. Other people would show up for an appointment only to walk away after seeing signs on the door about the requirements. NV Salon lost not only clients but also stylists, who pay rent on the chairs in the salon from their earnings, rather than being paid a wage.
“I just had to change my budget and be okay with it,” Hannon-Manderfield said.
She said some of her clients went out of the way to support her financially, which was very kind and appreciated.
“We’re going to push through this,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated, March 24, 2021.
Syl’s Cafe on River Street in Ontonagon.